Discussions on using the professional data recovery program R-STUDIO for RAID re-construction, NAS recovery, and recovery of various disk and volume managers: Windows storage spaces, Apple volumes, and Linux Logical Volume Manager.

I need help and/or advice on how to go about recovering data from my RAID if possible. I will provide as much detail as I can; feel free to ask questions and I can provide additional information as needed.

As stated in the subject line, I have an LSI 1068 RAID controller embedded on an Asus KFN32D-SLI/SAS board. I have three WD SATA drives on the 1068 controller and they were set up as a RAID 1E totaling 698MB. All was working fine until I received a hardware upgrade in the mail. The Asus board has a ZCR slot which supports an LSI 8300XLP controller. I was able to find one and had planned on upgrading to a hardware based RAID 5.

Being all excited I put the card in without making a backup of my data. Upon controller initialization, I got some sort of error message regarding the built-in RAID 1E configuration, and if this was unexpected, to turn off the computer. Of course I did and immediately removed the 8300XLP controller. When I turned the system back on and it went through the 1068 Controller initialization, I though that I had noticed that the controller had removed the RAID 1E from the three WD drives -- and when the system booted into XP my fears were confirmed. The RAID was gone. I am assuming that my life would have been a lot easier had this been just a RAID 1 as opposed to a RAID 1E, but that isn't the case.

If there is any way to get the info I had on these drives back, I would greatly appreciate any help/advice. I'm a 15-year computer tech at a local computer store (ultimate irony -- I never would work on anyone else's computer without mirroring the drive first, but why follow my own advice) and a school teacher, and have 15 years worth of typed documents / lesson plans / important software for my jobs / etc. Of course the flash drive that I had a separate backup of the utmost important things went bad 6 days ago The three WD drives which contained the RAID 1E remain untouched as of now.

to help with the boot sequence in the bios. I often times had to add or remove IDE drives from this system which messed with the boot sequence in the bios. The Fujitsu is the OS drive; the WD SATAs were used for the RAID 1E. The 1068 Controller automatically adjusted for the new configuration. Not sure if this matters for data recovery but too much information is (in this case) better than too little.